WANDERING IN TWO DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS: SPIRITUAL WANDERING AS THE IDEOLOGICAL BATTLEGROUND IN DOSTOEVSKY'S THE ADOLESCENT (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Motive of Wandering in the Early Work of Sergey Esenin
Sergey Esenin in the Context of the Epoch, 2021
The article traces the origins of the motif of wandering in the works of S. A. Esenin: personal impressions of communication with the wanderers and the pilgrimages to monasteries, folklore tradition, perceived in direct communication with its carriers and from the books, works of the Russian classical literature and the contemporaries, orthodox iconography and divine services. As an invariant of the motive, the author considers the pilgrimage to the land of Christ, the Mother of God and the saints, as well as the forced pilgrimage, primarily due to the exile to Siberia. Special attention is paid to the small poem “Mikola”, written by Esenin in his native village in the summer of 1915 and published at the same time in the newspaper “Birzhevye Vedomosti”. The main character of the work is Mikola (Saint Nicholas of Mirlikisky), who goes around the Russian land as a wanderer, acting as its intercessor and intercessor before God. The poem is analyzed in the context of works, written or p...
Dostoyevsky: Torments and Themes
Dostoyevsky's literary preoccupation was no mere superficial depiction of what contemporary life was for him, but rather was an in-depth exploration of the human person’s highest aspirations and hopes as well as his deepest and most disturbing pains and fears. This is essentially, then, what makes Dostoyevsky one of the first Christian existential writers. While some old themes may have been repeated in Dostoyevsky’s stories and novels, the reading public heard a totally new voice with a new angle on life; a vibrant human person thinking out loud into written language. This paper is an exploration of those torments and themes.
2019
Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918) is remembered mainly for its doomsday verdict on Western culture. It is less known, however, for a place reserved in it for Dostoevsky's posthumous leadership in the new millennial Reich. Since the "history of higher mankind fulfills itself in the form of great culture," which lasts roughly a millennium, the future belongs to Russia, the Russia of Dostoevsky: "To Dostoevsky's Christianity will the next thousand years belong." 3 It is tempting to explain Spengler's admiration for Dostoevsky by his proven dependence on Hippolyte Taine, the inventor of theories of the rise and decline of historic-cultural types and of racism in culture. Dostoevsky was also influenced by Taine and was well familiar with his De l'intelligence and L'Ancien Régime (PSS, 27:113, 377; 30[1]:30). But I will take another route. At the turn of the century in German-speaking lands, every significant artist and thinker nurtured on Nietzsche's affirmation of suprahistorical heroism was simultaneously looking for a way out of the stalemate faced by cultures of liberal democracy. 4 The humanistic ideals of Goethean Weimar did not produce citizens of the world but a society of professionals, public servants, and consumers. Nietzsche likens their state of mind to the happiness of masticating cattle, curious about the world beyond the slope only to the extent that richer outlying pastures could be found. With matching scorn, Dostoevsky satirizes German Bildungsbürgertum alongside the hedonistic frivolity of the French bourgeois in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1862) (PSS, 5:46-98). According to Georg Lukács, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were providing the answers to unfulfilled revolutionary yearnings of a bourgeois man born around 1870 (the same year as Lenin)-"the generation whose formative literary influences were Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and who has not moved from the anti-liberal apostasy fashionable at the time. " 5 18:36. Unless otherwise noted, this and all further references to Dostoevsky's work are to this academic edition, cited as PSS by volume and page.
Dostoyevsky between “Rosy” christianity and Gnosticism
2016
This article discusses Dostoyevsky’s ambivalent attitude to the world, his Gnostic assertions, and his world-accepting attitude. The author presents arguments supporting the conclusion that love for the world was the predominant attitude of Dostoyevsky, and clarifies the polysemantic concept of “world”. This attitude in Dostoyevsky is used to explain the strong attraction and reverence he felt for the “Russian startsi” phenomenon as an alternative to traditional monasticism and as an institution on which he set hopes that it might bring the Church closer to the “world”. The article presents some critical assessments made from the viewpoint of Orthodox doctrine regarding Dostoyevsky’s depiction of Russian “startsi” in his works. Keywords : Dostoyevsky, “startsi”, Orthodoxy, “this world”, Gnosticism
Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky: Christian Mystic and Social Philosopher
This first part of this study surveys significant phases in the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his moral and spiritual development as a Christian writer. Specifically, it focuses on his new vision of Russian life in the light of the Gospel of Christ and how this new worldview is reflected in his major novels. The second part of this paper compares the philosophical and literary outlook of the celebrated twentieth - century Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn with that of nineteenth century Dostoyevsky. Their common presuppositions as specifically Christian authors is emphasized.
This article explores two literary works based on the life of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky between the years 1867 and 1869: Лeто в Бaдeнe (Summer in Baden-Baden, 1982) by Leonid Tsypkin and The Master of Petersburg (1994) by J. M. Coetzee. Both novels endeavor to understand Dostoevsky. Their approaches are characteristic of late twentieth-century writing: the novelized life and travelogue, in which reality and fiction are interwoven. Both books recreate the life of Dostoevsky and the process by which he wrote The Gambler, The Possessed and The Idiot, based on Dostoevsky’s works and biographical sources. Each novel is framed by a question: Where does Dostoevsky’s writing come from? (Coetzee) and, What can account for this fascination with Dostoevsky? (Tsypkin). The comparative analysis offered here addresses the ways in which such fascination with the life and literary work of Dostoevsky is shaped, and examines the issue of Dostoevsky’s influence on these writers in line with Harold Bloom’s theory in The Anxiety of Influence.